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What’s Outside? Find Out With a Critter Camera

A 10-point buck wanders past our creature cam in the early morning hours

Amanda has a knack for buying just the right gift. This Father’s Day she surprised Jeff with a motion activated creature camera. National Geographic is full of animal photos from these types of cameras. The idea is, you mount one to a tree or a fence or a rock, and leave them outside for days at a time. When an animal walks by – surprise – gocha on film!

The price for these devices has really come down in recent years. Ours is called a StealthCam (we’ve seen them at Costco for around $99). It’s water-resistant, battery operated and includes a memory card. It has several settings so you can choose a single shot, a multiple shot burst, record video or custom set the number of images you want. It even has a night vision!

We’ve been playing around with it on our property in Plain, WA. This is the kind of stuff we usually see: people walking by or the canal maintenance guy Mike patrolling the ditch on his motorbike.

One afternoon we had a terrific rainstorm, and the falling rain was enough to trigger the camera

When we mounted the camera on a game trail we started picking up families of deer walking past

We were lucky enough to capture this large adult coyote. We had the setting on a six image burst, but this is the only shot we got. He must have been moving fast and picked up on the camera somehow.

Setting the camera up near a series of holes by a stump, we caught this mouse in the middle of the night.

Every few weeks we check the card to see what’s been walking around in the wee hours of the morning or late at night. And we can totally see how it would be fun to set one up outside your tent on a camping trip. It’s one thing to hear the crack of sticks in the middle of the night, and quite another to see video evidence of what’s actually sniffing around!

Gocha!

Want to see an update? Here are some of the recent photos from our camera!